Kingsley Amis: a man of alarming energies and appetites

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Kingsley Amis, who died on October 22, 1995, aged 73, was one of the top English novelists of the 20th century. He was known for his friendship with poet Philip Larkin, whom he met on May 5, 1941, while they were studying English at St John's College, Oxford. Amis had a vast appetite for work, words, women... and conflict. A lifetime of excess made him an irresistable subject, said his biographer Zachary Leader. This profile of Amis by Leader was first published in November 2006.

'Into our china shop of familial sensitivities,' Martin Amis wrote of a previous biographer, '[he] had come lurching and bucking and blundering. Every time he bent over to inspect a shattered vase, he would clear another shelf with the sweep of his backside. What was he doing in here?'

Martin was my friend, and when he asked me to write his father's authorised biography, my first thought was to turn him down. I had already edited Kingsley Amis's Letters (2000), and though my admiration for Amis's writing had grown over the years, as had my fascination with the man, I was wary of signing on for another long stint. There was also the 'bucking and blundering' passage.

Martin tried to reassure me: it wouldn't be like that, I wouldn't be like that. In the end, two factors helped to change my mind: time, to recover from the task of editing the correspondence, and the realisation that if I declined I would have to pass on to someone else hundreds of unpublished letters I had collected, as well as the detailed chronology I'd constructed to make sense of them. It was not just that I couldn't relinquish all that work, I couldn't relinquish the task of explaining Amis's life.

Writing the biography turned out to be great fun, but it was not without difficulties. To begin with, there was the matter of Amis's productivity. He wrote 25 published novels, seven volumes of poetry, 11 works of nonfiction, several dozen short stories, nine plays for radio and television, more than 1,300 pieces of uncollected journalism and almost 2,000 letters. He also edited 17 books of verse and prose.

As one of my aims in the biography was to make a case for the breadth and depth of Amis's literary achievement, the book was unlikely to be short. Then there was the matter of Amis's influence, admitted even by those who deplored it. For about 40 years, from the publication of Lucky Jim, in 1954, to his death, in 1995, Amis was a dominant figure in the writing of his age: at the heart of the pre-eminent poetical grouping of the period, the Movement, and complexly implicated in its various schemes of self-promotion; the earliest of redbrick novelists and Angry Young Men (it is Amis's face, not John Osborne's, that features on the front cover of Humphrey Carpenter's 2002 study of the 'Angries'); the most prominent literary figure among political, cultural and social polemicists, for elite and popular audiences alike.

Nor was Amis's life away from the desk without incident, as he claimed the lives of most writers were. Deprivation may have been tohis friend Philip Larkinwhat daffodils were to Wordsworth, but Amis wanted no part of it. That he was a man of alarming energies and appetites, the funniest man most people had ever met, or the cleverest, or the rudest, helped to make him a celebrity, everywhere quoted in newspapers and periodicals.

Kingsley Amis in 1990Credit:
Rex Features

His excesses, though, took their toll, on others as well as himself, as his writings make clear. 'I want more than my share before anyone else has had any,' a joke catchphrase, eventually found its way into Take a Girl Like You (1960), uttered by Patrick Standish, 'the most unpleasant person I've written about.' Few have been as perceptive or funny about bad behaviour as Amis, or been as consistently accused of it. What truth was there in these accusations? What, moreover, were Amis's motives in writing about his sort of bad behaviour?

To understand or excuse or apologise for it? Such questions are implicitly raised in the novels themselves, as when Patrick Standish tells Jenny Bunn: 'I'm not trying to get credit with you by saying I know I'm a bastard. Nor by saying I'm not trying to get credit. Nor by saying I'm not trying to by saying… trying… You know what I mean. Nor by saying that. Nor by saying that.' Comparably self-conscious passages occur throughout Amis's novels: like all his central characters, he was rarely simple or single, even at the end of his life, when the person and the persona often seemed indistinguishable. If stamina was an important requirement in writing the biography, so was tact.

The contract I signed with the Amis estate allowed me exclusive access to unpublished manuscripts and correspondence. Thanks to a letter of introduction from Martin Amis, almost everyone I approached agreed to be interviewed. The very few exceptions were women, usually ex-lovers (in Martin's phrase, Amis was 'a heroic adulterer'). I went three times to Ronda, in Andalucia, to interview Martin's mother, Lady Kilmarnock, Amis's first wife.

There I also interviewed Martin's older brother Philip, an amusing, nervy man, as brilliant a mimic as his father. The family was open and generous, as was Elizabeth Jane Howard, Amis's second wife. Though Amis was rarely out of the public eye, aspects of his life, often painful ones, remained hidden, or known only to a small circle of friends. If I thought these aspects revealing, either of the life or the work, I wrote about them.

In my contract with the estate, which had no right of veto as to style or content (but could deny permission to quote from unpublished materials), I undertook to show the executors what I had written before the book went to press. When I did so - not without trepidation - only a single objection was raised, to an unflattering description of Amis by one of his supervisees at Cambridge. This description struck Martin as unbelievable as well as cruel. Given everything else that he and Jonathan Clowes, the estate's other executor, let pass, I agreed to cut it.

Among the most difficult or delicate material I included was an account of Martin's sister, Sally, whose life was calamitous from the start. At two years and nine months, she fell from a table in the garden, landing on her head and fracturing her skull, went into convulsions, then a coma and nearly died. Some months later, while staying with her paternal grandparents, her grandmother died in her presence.

The circumstances of her death were particularly upsetting, for the grandfather had just gone to work and Sally was left alone all day with her grandmother's body. When Amis's father returned home, he discovered his wife lying dead on the bedroom floor, her face smeared with the lipstick Sally had removed from her handbag and clumsily tried to apply to her lips. 'When Sally got back to Swansea,' commented a friend, it was clear 'how anxious the experience had made her. If she saw her father asleep… she would try to prise his eyes open for fear that he, too, had died.'

Her adolescence was no less troubled. She became an alcoholic while still at school, married disastrously and died at 46. Amis's relations with her were complex and revealing, in ways that disturb but also bring credit to them both. The task of gathering evidence took two-and-a-half years, not counting the four years I'd spent editing the Letters. One of these years was spent at the principal repository of Amis's papers, the Henry E. Huntington Library, in San Marino, California, a paradise of rare books and manuscripts, botanical gardens and 18th-century English paintings.

The Amis archive at the Huntington consists of 68 boxes of manuscripts, notebooks, pocket diaries, correspondence, and ephemera. The Huntington also possesses Amis's library, including a number of books with witty or telling annotations, as well as Elizabeth Jane Howard's archive, about 90 boxes to date. Elizabeth Jane Howard was - and is - a great giver of dinner parties and houseparties, and Amis, too, loved company.

Among her papers are hundreds of bread-and-butter notes, many from celebrated guests, among them Iris Murdoch, John Betjeman, Julian Barnes, C. Day Lewis and Daniel Day-Lewis, who at 16 wrote charmingly to thank Jane for advice over homework ('There was exactly the right pressure on me to make me work,' a sure touch Jane also showed with Martin at this time) and over how to get on with his parents. I probably know more about the bread-and-butter note than any man alive. Amis sold his archive to the Huntington in 1984 for $90,000 and wasn't the least bit embarrassed about having done so.

When in 1960 Philip Larkin sought to enlist him in a campaign to preserve British literary manuscripts - a campaign now taken up by Larkin's biographer, Andrew Motion - Amis's reply was characteristically forthright: 'I will sell any of my manuscripts to the highest bidder, assuming such bidder to be of reputable standing, and I have no feeling one way or another about such bidder's country of origin. It seems to me no more incongruous that the Tate Gallery should have a large collection of Monets (say) than that Buffalo University, should have a collection of Robert Graves' manuscripts (say).

I view with unconcern the drift of British manuscripts to America, where our language is spoken and our literature studied.' The Amis archive in the Huntington is full of gems and mysteries. Among the unpublished manuscripts are three substantial novel fragments, each more than 100 pages, plus a completed novel entitled The Legacy, the immediate predecessor to Lucky Jim. The Legacy is interesting for a number of reasons, not least for its Modernist tricks (beginning with the hero's name: 'Kingsley Amis'). It was rejected by 14 publishers before Amis's agent gave up on it, and, though Amis consistently disparaged its 'experimental' character and was glad it was never published, while at work on it, as his letters attest, he liked what he had written.

I think it worth publishing, partly out of biographical interest, partly because it is often funny and perceptive, especially about small-town suburban manners and mores. The Huntington also possesses a handful of unpublished poems of power, one of which, 'Things tell less and less,' I brought to the attention of the executors and arranged to have published in the TLS in 2004, to widespread and approving notice. As it and several other unpublished works suggest, there is ample room for a new Collected Poems.

Among the mysteries in the Huntington archive are several posed by Amis's pocket diaries, some of which contain coded symbols, abbreviations and numerals. In the diary begun the day after his 50th birthday, on 17 April 1972, a time of deteriorating relations with Elizabeth Jane Howard, increased drinking, and a related loss of libido, each entry is followed by a number, never less than three, never more than eight. These numbers could signify drinks, presumably spirits, with wine and beer not counted, but they might also stand for pages written or marks out of 10 for the day, though an entry like: 'F: Too hung to do anything exc abt 2 letters. 7,' would seem to rule out all three possibilities, given the hangover.

The entry contains one other mysterious feature: 'F,' which appears very infrequently in the diary. If it stands for what one thinks it does (as opposed to, say, 'fibrillation', never mentioned in the correspondence), what is it doing on a hangover day, unless it took place in the early hours of the morning, while drunk? I spent many an afternoon in California pondering such puzzles.

Before the Huntington purchased Amis's papers, he sold several important manuscripts to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas (which partly accounts for the relatively low price the Huntington paid for what remained). Among these manuscripts is a partial typescript of the first version of Lucky Jim, originally titled 'Dixon and Christine'. The differences between 'Dixon' and Jim are striking, beginning with the fact that Jim, disconcertingly, is called 'Julian', quite the wrong name. The typescript contains numerous pencilled annotations, previously unidentified.

But anyone who knows Philip Larkin's hand, will recognise him as their author. Larkin's crucial role in revising Lucky Jim has long been recognised, but its extent has been a matter of controversy. Larkin's most important suggestion was that Amis 'sod up the romantic business actively', by which he meant make the novel more like a romance, with proper dragons and witches. The comic blocking figures - Professor Welch, the odious Bertrand, Jim's affected girlfriend, Margaret, whose laugh is like 'the tinkle of tiny silver bells' - are sometimes sympathetically treated in 'Dixon and Christine'; in the revised version, they are unsympathetic throughout, or almost throughout.

What the typescript also makes clear is how Larkin improved the novel in smaller ways, with many warnings against artificial or overwritten dialogue, as in 'terribly unnatural' or 'This speech might come from a stage play TOO BAD to be produced' or 'Horrible smell of arse' (later abbreviated to 'HS of A') or 'GRUESOME AROMA OF B' (presumably 'BUM'). Other suggestions concern pacing, as in 'not going quickly enough' or 'too detailed for their purpose'. The best of these annotations reads: 'This speech makes me twist about with boredom.'

When I returned to London from my year in California, Martin and his family were about to move to Uruguay. By the time he returned, several years later, the first draft of the biography was complete. Martin is not always the world's most reliable correspondent; his collected letters will make a slim volume. Once I'd begun writing we were able to meet only a couple of times, when he returned to London to see his sons. He patiently answered my queries, offering corrections of fact and emphasis.

His attitude to the biography, I now suspect, owed something to his father's example. When Martin began his first novel, The Rachel Papers, Amis left him to it. Initially, Martin attributed this non-reaction to 'sheer indolence', but he soon came to see it 'as a parental instinct, and a good one'. A similar instinct may have inspired Martin's policy with me. Whatever its origin, I am grateful for the freedom he allowed me.